More on Seat-Warming: Analog Service Denial?

February 28th, 2008 Comcast’s “seat-warming” execs can’t be trusted Posted by Robin Harris @ 7:19 am

Comcast hired dozens of “seat-warmers” that kept others from attending a Monday FCC hearing held at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society meeting room for an FCC hearing. God forbid that the public be seen at a hearing intended to solicit public comment. Then they lied about it.

According to an article in the Washington Post, Comcast acknowledged that it hired an unspecified number of people to fill seats, but said those people gave up their spots when Comcast employees arrived to take their places. Catherine Bracy, administrative manager of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, disputed that assertion, saying most of the three dozen seat-warmers . . . remained during the event’s opening hours, as many other people were turned away. “No employees came in to take those seats when the event started,” Bracy said. “Put the crack pipe down and take 2 steps back!” Nothing says confidence like hiring people to stack the audience.

Comcast justified its actions, saying "Comcast said it hired seat-holders only after the advocacy group Free Press urged its backers to attend. ...For the past week, the Free Press has engaged in a much more extensive campaign to lobby people to attend the hearing on its behalf,” the company said in a written statement. You haven’t heard of the powerful lobbying group Free Press? Me neither. But they have Comcast shaking in fear. And taking stupid pills by the fistful. Trust Comcast to regulate the Internet? They can’t manage the PR for a public hearing let alone the Internet.
Morons.

The Storage Bits take
Net neutrality means the telcos are common carriers who are not allowed to discriminate against some users. The principle goes back over 150 years to the early days of telegraphy. That this principle is even being debated is a tribute to the power of the telcos and their “seat-warmers” in Congress and the FCC. Comcast can’t be trusted and neither should any other telco.

Robin Harris has been selling and marketing data storage for over 20 years in companies large and small. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

Tarleton Gillespie, and on a separate note, Net Neutrality Hearing

Some of the media studies students in last semester’s senior seminar may remember looking briefly in class at the blog by Tarleton Gillespie, whose book Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture we read in the latter half of the course. I thought I would share his blog, named “Scrutiny,” with the rest of the class as it’s a very good way to familiarize yourself with the different debates and facets of intellectual property rights and copyright law in the digital age. On the right you’ll see a bunch of links some other blogs, including one by Lawrence Lessig, another MS staple worth checking out, who’s leading the creative commons licensing movement and is currently launching a movement to alter the “economy of influence” in Washington (“Change Congress,” the most recent entry on Gillespie’s blog).

Net Neutrality PS: I know linking to three blogs in one entry is probably a bit too much, but I was just exploring some of the blogs Gillespie links to and I remembered having a brief discussion on net neutrality in class a few weeks ago, so I thought I’d just quickily share. Boing Boing posted a story about the public FCC hearing in Boston yesterday regarding recent allegations that telecommunications megacompanies have been filtering customers’ internet and text message traffic.
Apparently, Comcast paid many people, employees and nonemployees alike, to arrive very early to the hearing and take up seats so that opponents would be denied entry. Comcast has admitted it hired nonemployees to hold seats or places in line for their employees, but others allege that most of these guys took a seat, denying hundreds of punctual would-be-attendees and reporters entry.